It Returns
by peenwise
Summary: The horror, if it ever did end, began in Derry. Where even after the Losers supposedly defeated the entity called It, the evil still lingered, stalking the sewers. A new generation of fear is born in this sequel to Stephen King's infamous novel "It". WARNING: WILL CONTAIN SPOILERS IF YOU HAVE NOT READ THE BOOK.
1. Prologue: After the Crash

"Evil never dies. It merely waits. And it grows stronger in the dark."  
― Jonathan Maberry

 ** _Prologue  
After the Crash_**

 _April 20th, 2008_

 _Cleveland, Ohio_

Raindrops are a makeshift melody as I'm coaxed into sleep, with the background noise of the car radio. My head rested against the window while droplets trailed down the glass, racing idly. I feel my dad's jeep come to a halt at a red stop light, its rays beaming against my eyelids. I focus on trying to sleep, but I soon hear my sister's voice on my right.

"Ronnie, are you awake?" Her voice peeks out from the sounds of pattering rain and bright red lights. I choose to ignore her, and I pretend to sleep. Little did I know that I would regret doing that. She and I were both born with girly names, mine being Roanna, and hers being Alison. But in some sort of rebellion against our parents, we chose to call ourselves rather boyish names to escape the femininity that came with our birth names. Also because they sounded a lot better, anyway. Plus, who names their daughter _Roanna_? I'm not an eighty year old woman. So then Ronnie and Al were born.

My dad calls from the driver's seat softly, "Let her sleep, hon. She's had a long day, and so have you."

The three of us always made habits of going to Sunday Night football games whenever they were in town. My dad was a huge Cleveland Browns fan, even though they always played like shit and never really won anything. He just liked spending time with his girls, I guess. It's a miracle we both even liked football to begin with, since he wasn't gifted with any boys to shove his hobbies on. Mom would come with us, but she works third shift at the hospital and can hardly ever make it to football games.

But me and Al always went, and we always ended up having a good time.

 _BUT NOT FOR LONG_.

I remember how haunting it felt when the tires finally started rolling when the red light changed to green. I remember that for a moment, I couldn't even hear the rain. Until _it_ happened. I remember how my body jerked, my head smashed against the window as something crashes into the car from the right. My heart races. I'm terrified. But I remember feeling like I was on a rollercoaster. _I remember wanting to hold my hands over my head_.

It brought me back to the days when we'd all go to the amusement park by the lakes. How my hands would freeze on the safety bar as the wind ripped against my face and through my hair. I would look and Al would have her hands in the air, screaming at the top of her lungs. I remember wanting to have that courage that she possessed.

Except this isn't a rollercoaster.

 _This is hell_.

We had finally come to a screeching halt, our vehicle scraping against glass and debris. The jeep had landed on its left side, with gravity pulling my body closer toward the road, which was now open through my smashed window. My mind is still taking time to catch up.

 _Drip._

I'm dazed, and my head hurts. It hurts like _crazy_ , but I try to focus on bringing my body upright. My hand reached to my forehead, only to pull away at the touch of my own blood.

 _Drip, drip._

"Daaaad!" I cry out in pain, my hand absentmindedly swats away the sensation of water leaking onto my face. Eyes, which were squeezed shut, open to try and find the buckle to my seatbelt. I squint against the darkness, trying to make out shapes, any shape.

 _Drip_.

The last drop hits right next to my eye, streaming down the side of my face like a tear. That red light came again, shining against a black figure on my right. Where Alison was. Except she wasn't normal. Her face in _agony_. She was... twisted. Broken.

Dead.

And I screamed, but I couldn't feel it. My heart wasn't in my chest anymore. It was in my throat.

* * *

1.

 _October 8th, 2012_

 _Derry, Maine_

"And then what happened, Ronnie?" Marcia asks me. Her pen paused on the sheet of paper she was writing on behind the safety of her clipboard. Her nails were a vibrant shade of red, her lipstick smudged on her upper lip. A woman in her mid fifties who partook in these evening sessions with me after my high school classes. She, too, had given me a sheet of paper to doodle, scribble, or write anything I wanted. She usually liked to look at it after our sessions together, but I got into the habit of taking them home with me. Not that she minded. The things I drew puzzled even myself. It was like some other force was controlling my body, moving the marker... Sometimes a rotten face would appear among the inattentive scribbling. _Smiling back at me_.

But not today. I lounged in the chair on the opposite end of the room with my back against the arm rest, with my legs curled over the side while I drew a small cartoon turtle, not with any skill or ease. It actually looked kind of cute after I finally got it down. It took me a minute to actually speak again - only prompted by Marcia calling my name again.

"And that was it," I admitted, "She died. We buried her four days after the accident. I switched schools. We moved here to Maine. And my folks decided I was a big enough of a nutcase to have to come and talk to you." And it only became worse after these last few months. I began hearing voices, _seeing things_ \- things that I couldn't explain or talk about. Except with Marcia. She calls it schizophrenia. I call it something entirely different. Something that I cannot explain. How could something that wasn't real make your insides do those horrible flips? Or make the hair stand up on your arms? How could something not _real_ make you feel like there's something always there, watching you? From behind that tree, from across the street, from the pipes,

 _from the sewer_.

I grabbed another marker.

Marcia didn't like that answer very much, "You know I don't think you're a nutcase, Ronnie. You were only twelve years old when your sister died. That's something difficult to process at such a delicate age."

 _HER FACE. HER FACE WAS IN AGONY. REMEMBER HER FACE, RONNIE?_

I flinched. Al's frozen, dead face appeared in my mind. It disappeared just as quickly as it had came. My hand, which held a red marker, skidded against my sheet of paper.

"I think our little talks have been having a positive effect on you." Her voice is warm, just like the scent of the wax burner she was melting in her small, cozy office. " Do _you_ feel like you're slowly coming to terms with what happened to Alison? With how its affected you and your family?"

There was a moment where I was going to answer her. I knew that, yes, my family would never recover from this. That my parents were always going to look at me, but they would never _see_ me. They would only see Alison. _I would only see Alison_. She would haunt my every step. Everywhere I looked, I saw her. Every time I closed my eyes, when I dreamt, she was always there. That horrible, twisted face she had was embedded into my mind. I knew that _It_ wasn't her, that _It_ was something else, but I couldn't quite place what _It_ was. But my eyes wandered to my doodling paper, and something caught my eye. Something that disturbed me, but I couldn't understand why.

That small drawing of the turtle had been marked over, with a big, _ugly_ line of red.


	2. Chapter One: The Rain Over Derry

_The Rain Over Derry_

When it rained back home in Ohio, it was a bother. An annoyance. It came and it went sporadically and without much warning. It was something for people to talk about, to fill empty spaces and meaningless conversation. The rain was just that: _rain_. However, when it rained in Derry, there was a strange disquiet that no one wanted to talk about or acknowledge. It was like the rain brought back horrible memories to this town. Memories about a little boy with a yellow slicker that came out to play at the wrong time and met his untimely end by following a paper boat - that no one would later find, on a rainy day after a flood in the midst of October.

I didn't know anything about this boy, only stories that _floated_ around the town. I heard stories that something gobbled him up. Or that his arm was torn off. Or that someone saw something eating him in the middle of the street, only to drag his small, mangled body into the sewer.

Of course, I didn't believe any of it. Certainly, if a boy _did_ die, he must have fallen in the storm drain and drowned, and died by complete accident, right? Not by any monster or ghoul, right? Not because of the Boogey Man, or the Teenage Werewolf, of the Creature from the Black Lagoon, _RIGHT_? Because being a young girl at sixteen, you don't necessarily believe in those kinds of monsters.

You believe in the ones that haunt your mind, the ones that are closest to you.

The ones that are _real_.

Ghosts weren't something that I ever thought existed until I came to Derry. My sister's face only appeared when I closed my eyes at night, or when I would recall those memories from the night of the crash. No… after I came to Derry, those images would come to me in passing while on the street, while getting up in the middle of the night to pee, even when I'd gaze out the window, _I'd see her_. Though those images of her would go as quickly as they would come. I'd take a pill and they'd slowly lull out of my consciousness, at least for a little while. However, today was not one of those days where I'd see her among a sea of faces, but I did think of the rain.

I thought about that boy who died, more than half a century ago.

Reluctantly, I moved up the stairs that led up to our house on Witcham Street, the street where that dead boy met his premature end. I passed that storm drain without looking at it or acknowledging its existence, instead, my beat up converse carried me up those wooden stairs and through the front door. Lingering downstairs wasn't my intention, which was initially to wander up to my room and stay there until my parents retired to their bedroom for the night, or until my mom went to bed and my dad fell asleep watching television. Not that he watched football anymore, because every time he thought of football he thought of Alison and when he thought of Alison he thought about the crash and how it was all his fault ALL HIS FAULT. Neither one of those things happened. My dad, for some reason or another, wasn't home, and my mother was sitting there at the dining room table, and I knew I had to ask her if the rumors were true. Or if she had even heard them to begin with. I knew. I _knew_ but I didn't want to know. I didn't want to _know_ that a boy died just several feet from my house.

When Al died, my mom left her job for a while. She returned after a few weeks, only to have a mental breakdown when a young boy had come into the Emergency Room on the squad, suffering severe injuries due to a car accident. Drunk driver. _The same as Alison_. He had died there on that hospital bed, and my mom lost it. She never returned to work after that.

I knew she had a burning hatred in her gut for the man who had run into us. She couldn't even look him in the eye and tell him how much he had ruined her perfect family. How he had ruined her life. Because he, too, had died in that crash.

 _I wish I would have been able to kill him myself_ , she had said once, while looking into my sister's room. Like she was speaking to Al directly. I had been standing there at the end of the hall at the time, and my mother had looked at me and I turned away and she did too and we just never spoke of it after that. Because I knew she wanted _some_ kind of justice for my sister.

Dad didn't quite show how much he suffered because of Al's death, you'd hardly even know just by looking at him just how much he was dying on the inside. At Al's funeral, he kept it together more than any of us did. Of course, tears were inevitable as we all walked alongside her casket to go to where she'd be buried...

 _( ALONG WITH THE WORMS )_

… and my mom collapsed on the ground and screamed.

"Mom?" I asked as I pulled down the hood of my sweatshirt, which was damp with rainwater. My hair, which was originally a dirty blonde, appeared brown from the moisture and it stuck to my face in disarray. I lingered there by the front door, staring across the living room to the table where my mom sat.

She didn't acknowledge me. A dark shadow cast across her skinny face like she was in a deep trance, like she was off in some other world as she knitted. Her eyes glazed over, only for them to float toward me after I called for her a second and third time. There was something off-putting about how slowly her eyes drifted, like she wasn't caught off guard or scared by my sudden intrusion. I suddenly didn't even want to ask her anything anymore.

My throat cleared, filling that empty void of silence between us, "You heard about the boy who died on this street a long time ago, right?"

"Georgie Denbrough." Her voice was flat, and she wasn't looking at me anymore. My mother's skeletal fingers continued her knitting.

Suddenly, my stomach lurched. I broke out in a cold sweat. The boy now had a _name_. Two seconds ago, the story was just that: _A story_. And now, it was becoming more and more real. Before I could even think to keep my mouth shut, I was already asking what I was dreading to know, "So… what happened to him?"

I half expected my mother to brush off my question and continue to knit, to tell me to stop slouching, or to go dry myself off. Or ask me about therapy.

 _( She_ never _asks you about therapy )_

But her voice came again, this time with more volume. Almost _cheerful_. "He just _floated_ off."

My hazel eyes blink, "..What?"

"Hehe! He floats now, Ronnie." Stephanie Walsh is suddenly knitting much faster, the needles moving in quick succession. We float, we float WE ALL FLOAT. That voice echoed in my ears and ricocheted against my skull, but it does not belong to my mother. It's like a voice of a child's. My gaze flickers from my mom's face, which grew more and more crazed, to her hands. It isn't long before needles are piercing through her palms. Warm blood dripping onto the floor and onto her lap. But she continued to laugh. She laughed so LOUDLY I could only stand there, her voice piercing through my eardrums. I'm terrified. I'm terrified and I can almost gag on the stench of iron in the air.

 _( Ronnie )_

"Mom…. s… _stop it_ …." I managed to whimper, but I couldn't hear myself past her screaming laughter and the sounds of those needles piercing through her skin. I could almost feel myself slipping into another panic episode. _What are you talking about? What are you TALKING ABOUT who floats what are you saying mom this isn't a JOKE please stop doing this -_

"Roanna!"

My heart, which beat a hundred miles a minute, froze at the sound of my mom yelling my name with a twinge of annoyance. I didn't realize it, but my eyes were squeezed shut, petrified to open them to see my mom's hands completely mutilated, with her own blood stained all over the floor. But when I did finally open them, I only saw my mom in the same spot, her hands completely unharmed, except her eyes were condescendingly waiting for my reply.

"What is it? You're not seeing things again, are you?" Her tone doesn't sound concerned. It sounds more irritated than anything. Her foot starts to tap impatiently against the carpet.

Slowly, I shake my head. _Liar._ "No, it's nothing… I'm going to go up to my room." And silently, I move up the stairs, still half stunned from what I just saw. My feet carry me to the bathroom, to the medicine cabinet where I retrieved my medication, and popped one into my mouth. I brought my lips to the faucet where I took a few gulps of water before swallowing, my hands hovering over the basin, trembling.

That wasn't real. That wasn't _real_. But why, for some reason, did that boy's name sound so familiar? Georgie Denbrough. _He just floated off_. But what did that mean? So it was an accident, then? One October evening that young boy went outside after the flood in Derry and chased his small paper boat and was never seen again? That answer didn't sit right with me

 _( Because that's not_ true. _It just GOBBLED him up )_

Gazing into my reflection, I shake my head again. It was almost as if an invisible force was coaxing me to find out what infected this town, while another was pulling me in another direction, trying to keep me complacent. Trying to keep me afraid. And, _oh God_ , I was afraid. Afraid of this town. Something was hiding under the ghastly wound that was Derry, Maine. Something was hiding, and feeding off of the people who lived here.

 _Something that hid deep in the sewers._

And for a fleeting moment, I thought I heard whispering from the faucet of the basin. An eerie sound that I could have mistaken for a drop of water falling down the pipe, but I crazily thought that it could have been Georgie. I half imagined that he'd come up from deep inside that small hole and tell me why the rain was a terrible omen on this town, _especially now_. He'd tell me who _or what_ it was that killed him.

 _( He just FLOATED OFF )_

I swallowed, and I turned and left that bathroom without looking back.

* * *

 **Author's Note:** Hello! My name is Kit, and I'm an aspiring horror novelist. What better way to start and get some experience under your belt than play a bit with Stephen King's beloved work of ' It '? This story is a direct sequel to his original novel, since it's never clarified if whether or not Bill and the others really did defeat It. So why not throw some brand new characters in and see what I can come up with? This story is a complete _ONE SHOT_ and I would appreciate if you would leave a kind review and let me know how you're enjoying it so far! _**DISCLAIMER:**_ This story will contain some extremely triggering content, including but not limited to slurs, racism, homophobia, abuse, sexual assault, school shootings, etc. So if those things are not your cup of tea, I would highly recommend not reading. If you've read the original novel, you'd know that these are all things that are included in the book. Just know that I do not condone any of these things and only aspire to write Pennywise the Dancing Clown as horrifyingly as I can.

Thank you all and enjoy reading!

\- Kit


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